Conyers turns to court in bid for 25th term in Congress

A Detroit judge said he might make a decision Friday in a dispute over whether U.S. Rep. John Conyers Jr., one of the country's longest-serving congressmen, gets on the primary ballot.

Conyers, a member of the U.S. House since Lyndon Johnson was president, is fighting for political survival, seeking reversal of an order barring his name from the ballot.

State election officials disqualified Conyers, 85, from the Aug. 5 Democratic Party primary ballot because too many signatures on his nominating petition were collected by non-registered campaign workers, a violation of Michigan law.

That left Conyers with limited choices: dropping his race, filing suit or running as a write-in candidate, an expensive and rarely successful option. He sued. If successful in court and then at the ballot, he’ll become the longest-serving representative as his Michigan colleague John Dingell, 87, retires this year.

“The Supreme Court has not resolved this precise question, but prior rulings from the Court, along with several more recent lower court decisions, all support the legal claims Rep. Conyers had raised,” Ellen Katz, a University of Michigan law professor who has written about election law, said in an email.

Horace Sheffield III, a Detroit minister and Conyers’ opponent in the primary, was set to argue today that Conyers waited too long to attack the Michigan law. A petition challenge by his campaign manager knocked Conyers off the ballot.

“By filing this suit well after the nomination petition deadline, plaintiffs have slept on their rights,” Sheffield, 59, said in court papers, referring to Conyers and his supporters.

“The state has to be able to administer an orderly election,” his lawyer, Eric Doster, said in a phone interview. “The rules they’re challenging have been on the books since 1966.”

Judge questions lawyers

In court today, federal Judge Matthew Leitman sharply questioned lawyers. Conyers' lawyers asked Leitman to throw out a Michigan law that puts restrictions on circulators. But the judge questioned why critics would claim the law is an illegal burden when the Conyers campaign believed it had followed it.

State attorneys say it's unfair to attack the law when others have followed it.

Leitman said he might rule Friday. He first wants to see what state election officials say that day about Conyers' candidacy.

Conyers, now the second-longest serving representative, was first elected to Congress in 1964. One of 13 founding members of the Congressional Black Caucus in 1969, he was part of the Watergate impeachment hearings in 1974, played a critical role in passing the Violence Against Women Act in 1994 and was chairman of the House Judiciary Committee from 2007 to 2011.

His district, which is overwhelmingly Democratic, encompasses Detroit’s west side and several smaller Wayne County cities. In 2012 Conyers won 83 percent of the votes cast in the general election.

In April, as part of his bid for a 25th term, Conyers’s campaign filed petitions with about 2,000 signatures, double the number required to place him on the ballot. Election officials rejected hundreds of those because of technical violations such as incorrect voter addresses.

Of 1,236 remaining signatures, Sheffield successfully challenged 644 because they were collected by nonregistered campaign workers. That left 592 valid ones, according to Wayne County Clerk Cathy M. Garrett.

“Conyers would have had well more than 1,000 signatures on the nominating petitions and would have qualified for the August primary ballot” if Michigan law didn’t require registered voters to gather petitions, lawyers for the congressman and his supporters said in court papers.

Political speech

Conyers last week joined a lawsuit against Garrett and the Michigan secretary of state filed by two supporters, including one who distributed petitions. They want U.S. District Judge Matthew F. Leitman to order election officials to count the invalidated signatures and place his name on the ballot.

The U.S. Court of Appeals in Cincinnati “found five years ago that requiring voter registration is unconstitutional,” said Mary Ellen Gurewitz, an attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union Fund of Michigan who represents Conyers’ supporters.

“The state of Michigan can’t enforce an unconstitutional law,” she said in a phone interview.

Petition-circulation is political speech and can’t be restricted under the U.S. Constitution, said Andrew Paterson, the attorney for Robert Davis, a member of the Highland Park school board who also sued and wants the judge to invalidate the petition law.

“This is an easy lawsuit,” he said in an interview.

Write-in campaign

Separately, Conyers has appealed the disqualification to Secretary of State Ruth Johnson. Officials in that office will “recheck the work” of the county clerk, said Gisgie Davila Gendreau, Johnson’s spokeswoman. Conyers is unlikely to prevail because state law requires petition gatherers to be registered voters, she said.

On Johnson’s behalf, Michigan Attorney General Bill Schuette, a Republican, is opposing Conyers’s legal bid. He argues in court papers that it would be “unfair” to other candidates to change the petition law after the filing deadline.

The state will decide by June 6, Gendreau said. The judge will probably issue a quick decision as well because ballots go to the printer in mid-June, Gurewitz said.

Ultimately, Conyers will wage a write-in campaign if rejected by the judge and secretary of state, Bert Johnson, his campaign manager, said. The Conyers campaign is heartened by the success of Detroit Mayor Mike Duggan in winning last year’s primary as a write-in, he said in an interview.

“We know it will be an expensive proposition,” Johnson said. “But we’re fully prepared to execute that plan.”